Papers presented by Maki Umemura since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"Convergent aspirations: The emergence of a therapeutics ecosystem in Boston"

Abstract:

This paper explores the history of the life science business since the 1980s, from ground-breaking scientific discoveries, the relative decline of pharmaceutical firms, and the rise of biotech companies engaged in novel therapeutic modalities, such as tissue engineering, cell therapy and gene therapy. The project explores how the evolving innovation ecosystems have shaped this field. The research builds upon a long and rich body of business history scholarship on medicine, which include industry-level (Galambos and Sturchio 1998, Chandler 2009) and firm-level (Davenport-Hines and Slinn 1992, Hughes 2011, studies, as well as works over a range of medicines (Liebenau 1987, Mann and Plummer 1991) and geographies (Monnais 2019, Yang 2021). Significant advances in medicine over the past century have also generated scholarship that has spanned various technological modalities, from chemistry-based pharmaceuticals (Burhop 2009, Cramer 2015) to biotechnology-based biologics (Marks 2009, Rasmussen 2014). Despite decades of development, however, limited scholarship explores the world of firms engaged with emerging technological modalities, including cells and genes. The project also draws insight from the literature on innovation ecosystems (Moore 1996, Adner and Kapoor 2010, Gomes et al. 2018), particularly as it relates to their emergence and evolution (Moore 1993, Dedehayir et al 2018). Existing scholarship refers to innovation ecosystems as collaborative endeavours of a constellation of actors; one in which suppliers may provide essential components and technologies, diverse organizations offer complementary products and services, and customers generate demand (Moore 1996). Prior studies have adopted a longitudinal perspective that examines the dynamics and coevolution of actors, institutions and technologies in innovation ecosystems (McKelvey 1999, Beltagui et al. 2019, Kuan and West 2023). Incorporating this lens from the ecosystems literature, this research considers how evolving changes in the community of actors, their interactions and interdependence have shaped the trajectory of the life science business.

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2022 Mexico City

"Local Hypes and Hopes: Dissonant expectations and the shaping of the cell and gene therapies sector in the United States, Britain and Japan"

Abstract:

Business historians have long examined fluctuating cycles of expectations in new technology sectors – from railways to the Internet – often through the lens of stock market performance. In this context, this paper explores how evolving national contexts conditioned firm expectations and shaped the historical experience of the cell and gene therapies field. Across disciplines, existing research has explored the fluctuating cycle of expectations associated with new technologies as they move towards commercialisation. The hype cycle model, for example, suggested that an initial period of inflated expectations was followed by substantial disappointment, which was then followed by a more realistic assessment of the technology’s potential. In investigating cell and gene therapies, this paper contributes to works on the business of medicine. These include scholarship on therapeutic products, from: aspirin from the late 19th century; penicillin after World War II; to the beginnings of the biotechnology industry in the United States. Research involving new technological modalities includes those on recombinant DNA drugs and monoclonal antibodies. While existing work has also observed periods of excitement followed by disappointment, few have focussed on the role that local contexts play in differentiating these cycles. This research shows that patterns of expectations can vary considerably across settings and shape dissonant industry trajectories. It does so through the cell and gene therapy sectors in the United States, Britain and Japan. All three locations -- while somewhat varied -- experienced growing expectations from the 1980s, followed by clinical disasters in the late1990s that led to significant disappointment. Yet subsequent paths diverged, as the United States and Britain experienced recovery by the mid 2010s, while similar trends were absent in Japan. The paper is based on a combination of company documents and oral interviews.

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2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform

"Paradox Adoption of Medical Technology? Reshaping Fertility in Japan, 1983-2018"

Abstract:

Novel medical technologies – including those that have demonstrated clinical efficacy – often struggle to gain widespread adoption. These arise from a range of factors, including: high cost of treatment; lack of robust ethical or regulatory frameworks; insufficient skills base for administration; or managing complex supply chains. Despite limited success rates, however, fertility businesses that offer assistive reproductive technology (ART) procedures such as in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), have experienced phenomenal growth over the past few decades. By 2018, the global fertility services market was estimated at $20.4 million (Data Bridge 2019). This paper examines the historical growth of the fertility business in Japan, with particular focus on the IVF segment since the country’s first procedure in 1983. The case of Japan highlights the paradox in which a technology with relatively low success rates achieve high levels of technological adoption. For instance, babies born from IVF in Japan increased from 18,168 (or 1.64% of total births) in 2004 to 56,617 (or 5.5% of total births) by 2017 (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare 2020). Furthermore, Japan accounts for the highest level of IVF procedures in the world, accompanied by the lowest rates of success. A 2016 study (Dyer et. al. 2016) indicated live birth rates of 7% in Japan, compared to well over 20% in France, Germany or the UK, or the United States. The paper contributes to a subject area often overlooked in business history scholarship and refers to the literature on technology adoption. In particular, it builds on works that explore how the “readiness” or “capacity” of a given setting to adopt a novel technology (Abrishami et al. 2014, Ulucanlar et al. 2013, Gardner 2017) and support the development of a frontier industry. It uses a range of sources, from official government reports, intra-governmental organisations, to newspapers and magazines.

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